Increasingly more sophisticated automated manufacturing systems are being developed and adopted by industry. Greater attention is being paid to automatic inspection and tool compensation to improve the productivity of such systems. An important aspect of such inspection is in-process inspection to spot dynamic failures, such as breakage or tool wear. A variety of techniques for real-time tool and process monitoring that would allow detection and correction of such errors have been and are currently being developed. A variety of approaches, which rely on sensing different operating conditions, have been utilized. There is thus a need for a flexible monitoring system which is readily adapted to different manufacturing systems, different monitoring techniques and different sensors.
In addition, due to the increasing precision of automatic manufacturing systems, there is an increasing need for tool monitoring techniques which incorporate multiple condition sensing and differentiation of alarm limits depending upon the particular operation being performed by a machine tool.
A further need dictated by the increasing precision and complexity of automated manufacturing systems is economic high-resolution taring of the output signals from multiple sensors, to compensate for sensor drift and ignore the effects of friction forces that are generated under no-load conditions.